


Grand Days

by elsmaster



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Childhood, Crime Scenes, Drug Use, Growing Up, M/M, Post Reichenbach, Tea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-21
Updated: 2013-05-21
Packaged: 2017-12-12 13:01:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/811860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elsmaster/pseuds/elsmaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of bees, sparrows, bruises, despairing brothers and parents, crime scenes, and falling. Or: Sherlock Holmes, the making of.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grand Days

**Author's Note:**

> 06/01/14 - Did a few cosmetic touch-ups and fixed a couple of typos. Hopefully it's all better now.

Earliest memory: Grandfather's study. The details are faded, worn by multiple attempts of deletion (unnecessary data, hardly useful; impossible to remove completely). A sturdy desk, the top of it at chin level (unable to change the perspective of the memory: room viewed from a solid height of four feet), the glossy varnish worn dull on the left hand side where Grandfather habitually places his cup of coffee; rarely drinks it, lets the bottom of the mug leave sticky rings on the desk, bitter coffee growing cold. Sherlock hates the taste, which is why Grandfather only gives him half a cup and secretly adds two bits of sugar in it. Sherlock pretends he doesn't notice and remembers to grimace every time he takes a sip. 

On the desk: glass topped boxes containing a variety of exotic insects, pinned down, preserved, long since dead.

Sherlock cares far less about the Egyptian dung beetles than he does about the common honey bees.

Grandfather teaches him to dissect a wasp. Mummy is not pleased when she finds out, says it’s not right to let children cut up living things. The wasps are already dead so Sherlock doesn't quite see the problem.

‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Mummy tells him.

Sherlock sets up a fly trap in his bedroom and dissects his prey when everyone else has gone to bed.

 

 

Before Mycroft becomes fat and annoying and starts looking at Sherlock in a way that makes him want to punch him in the gut, he teaches his little brother how to fold perfect paper aeroplanes (possibly other paper things as well, although Sherlock may have picked that up somewhere else, much later, no idea why or what for, but he _does_ know how to fold a crane, and a fox, and a lotus flower).

They walk up a grassy hill behind the house, sheets of paper in their pockets and sun on their backs. Once on top, they begin folding the world’s most impressive air force made entirely of off-white paper, appropriated from the bottom drawer of their father’s desk. 

Mycroft is far better at folding planes than Sherlock is. It’s irritating.

They both hold their breaths when their fleet floats down onto the field on the other side of the hill. After each and every plane has disappeared into the tall grass, the brothers walk down the hill, casually, as though completely indifferent to the results of their little race.

Once down, Mycroft picks up one of his creations, several feet away from the rest, and holds it up, thoroughly pleased with himself. Sherlock huffs, and just as they begin the walk back up the hill, he counts the planes on the ground. He fights the smirk and settles for a frown.  

Five feet away from Mycroft’s pedigree plane lies one imperfect paper aeroplane and Sherlock can’t quite contain his smug little grin.

 

 

 

Sherlock finds the bird under his window. A sparrow; eyes tightly shut, tiny legs stiff and toes curled into what look like clawed fists; the small body rigid and unmoving. He picks up the bird and turns it over in his hands, running his fingers over the smooth brown-grey feathers. He gently spreads its wings and uncurls its feet.

He pulls out his shirt tails and tucks the bird against his side, doing his best to not look like he has a dead sparrow under his shirt. He rushes back into the house, the bird a ghost of a weight against his palm, and into his room. He puts the bird in a shoe box under his bed.

Later, when everyone else has gone to bed, he carefully cuts the bird open and catalogues his findings in a notebook filled with repetitive notes on wasp and fly and frog dissection.

 

 

 

He dislikes school.

He dislikes it even more when his teacher and his parents sit him down and tell him he’s wrong (not in so many words, but he’s not _stupid_ ). That he is not like everyone else. He disagrees, asks why Mrs. Patterson always smells like Father’s wine cellar, and is promptly requested by the very same Mrs. Patterson to please leave.

He’s taken to see a multitude of doctors, all just as wrong about everything, and then he’s given a bottle of small pills and told they’ll help him concentrate.

When everyone else has gone to bed, he replaces the pills with the sweets Mycroft thinks he has cleverly hidden in one of the bookshelves in the sitting room, and flushes the real ones down the toilet.

Sherlock obediently takes his medicine and his parents are happy.

He keeps getting better and better at reading everyone he meets, just by looking at them and observing their involuntary twitches and glances and sighs, and has no idea what to do with all the new data, other than writing it down in one of his notebooks, of which there are now many: all hidden in a shoe box under his bed, along with a meticulously cleaned skull of a _Passer domesticus_.

 

 

 

When Father is away, Mycroft takes his seat at the dinner table and tells Sherlock to eat his greens. Mummy beams. Sherlock scowls and hurls his plate across the table. A bit of lettuce clings to Mycroft’s hair.

When Father is home, he invites Mycroft to join him and his textbook-boring colleagues in his study to discuss politics and possibly the weather. They all drink Scotch, and when Sherlock presses his ear against the closed door of the study, he hears a dull drone of dull topics being discussed, and the occasional brief burst of pretentious laughter.

Sherlock plays his violin a little too loudly and with scorn.

(He also points out that the wife of one of the men is, in fact, having an affair with Father.

The Holmes household is _very_ quiet for the next two weeks, and Mummy and Father only yell at one another when they think no one can hear them.)

 

 

 

The observations become a static noise, echoing in his head, making it difficult to concentrate on any one thing at a time. He begins to speak his observations out loud, more often than he already has, and hardly ever returns home from school without a black eye or an impressive bruise on his chin. 

It does help, though.

Being rewarded with a bit of pain for his deductions forces him to concentrate on nothing but the point where knuckles meet his jaw bone and it feels like his entire skull stings, blissfully empty of any other data for a split second.

He becomes quite the expert at school yard boxing.

Mummy despairs.

When he plays the violin, the chin rest presses against his bruises just enough to provide a temporary solace from the intensifying hum in his head.

 

 

 

He makes more enemies than friends, spends more time alone in his room with his increasing variety of chemical and biological experiments, plays his violin into the small hours of the night (or until Mycroft taps gently on his door and tells him to keep it down, unless he wishes to find his notebooks gone) and discovers the small collection of books on forensic science Father has in his study. He sleeps less and less, and spends his nights figuring out connections between his uncategorised observations.

 

 

 

He dislikes university almost as much as he disliked school. The only dubiously redeeming factor: Victor.

It doesn’t take Sherlock more than five minutes to understand just how dull and ordinary Victor is, much like everyone who’s born into money and set mannerisms. But then Victor calls him _interesting_ and it takes Sherlock a moment to place the strange jolt of _something_ that shocks through him and makes him blink and frown simultaneously. Surprise.

Victor thinks he’s _interesting_.

Not a cunt, or a twat, or a tosser.

 _Interesting_.

They sit on the floor in Victor’s room and smoke a pack of cigarettes a night. Victor lets Sherlock deduce him and laughs even at the most scathing remarks.

‘You’re not going to make any friends like that,’ he tells Sherlock.

Sherlock doesn’t need to make friends. He rather thinks he already has.

Victor lets him dissect road kill and experiment with toxic plants, and asks relevant questions, and not once does he call the experiments weird or insane of freaky. Sherlock wants to understand _why_ but decides to figure it out himself, rather than straight out ask about it.

He doesn’t need to take great deductive leaps when Victor puts his hand on Sherlock’s knee when they’re down to their last two cigarettes on a nondescript Thursday evening, sitting on the floor in Victor’s room.

Sherlock can’t place this either; the thrum against his ribs and the way his mouth goes just a bit dry.

 

 

 

Sherlock doesn’t love Victor, not exactly. He’s not sure the word is in his vocabulary at all, other than as a theoretical motivator, a cause for the irrational things other people do.

He doesn’t love but he almost wants to, because that would be _normal_. And sometimes he wonders if normal would be better.

So he mimics. Learns to smile just right, learns to return Victor’s affections. Be normal.

It doesn’t work.

He’s almost shocked by how devastated Victor is, and only mildly disappointed when he stops talking to him entirely.

 

 

 

If university was barely tolerable before, it’s intolerable now that Sherlock is alone with his buzzing mind, brain filled to the brim with observations and secrets and deception that no one else seems to notice, and no one to share his knowledge with. Everything gets jumbled up; a cacophony of unfiltered information twisting into knots inside his stupid, slow _human_ brain.

The cigarettes and the bruises and the violin no longer help, and when lack of food and sleep only bring him to an unhelpful collapse, he turns to medicine.

He discovers cocaine and everything seems to fall into place.

He begins to exist in a chemically altered reality, where conclusions are formed effortlessly, and facts snap together like puzzle pieces; much quicker and more efficient than before. Suddenly everything makes _sense,_ in that perfect, immaculate sort of way he’s only dreamed of all his chaotic, inconsistent life.

Abstracts like time and space lose their meaning and only the relations between details matter. Everything seems to come down to cigarette ash on the pavement and brown flecks dirt under the fingernails of the man outside a 24-hour supermarket at three in the morning, and the man behind the register (four children, needy wife who sleeps with her best friend’s husband but complains when hers as much as looks at other women) only looks at him a little funny when he buys a pack of all brands and sorts of cigarettes in stock.

 

 

 

He stumbles onto a crime scene, manages to insult everyone on sight in less than ten minutes and point out a crucial clue everyone has overlooked (shoe prints; why do they think they can dismiss something as crucial as shoe prints), which leads him to very quickly conclude that the 53-year-old sales associate was murdered by his nephew who likely lives in Holborn.

Sherlock spends the night in police custody and officially meets Detective Sergeant Lestrade, who witnessed his hurricane of a performance the night before.

Sherlock helps him solve three more crimes during the next month, and suddenly has an odd sense of purpose.

 

 

 

He sits on a ratty mattress on the floor in a flat he doesn’t quite recognise, Billy the skull on his knee (his friend, his only friend) and Mycroft (standing in the doorway in his grey pinstripe suit and bespoke Italian leather shoes and the umbrella he’s taken to carrying with him, rain or shine, resting on the crook of his arm; more lines on his face than the last time he scowled at his baby brother, the disapproving crease between his eyebrows permanently embedded on his prematurely aging skin) tells him he’s a disappointment, and Sherlock (thinks he laughs but) huffs and tells him to piss off.

Mycroft stays and has his lackeys find Sherlock’s stash (he should have done a better job at hiding it, and maybe he deliberately didn’t, maybe he wanted someone to find it) and discard of it, and when they’re gone, Mycroft still refuses to leave until Sherlock has sat curled on the floor, with Egyptian dung beetles crawling under his skin for days and days and years and months and minutes. And somehow Mycroft is always there, never saying a word, waiting it out with him. 

 

 

 

It’s all right, he tells himself. He’ll be fine. He tries and then doesn’t try enough but at least it’s not as bad as the first time.

He thinks faster when he’s high but is denied access to crime scenes if he is, so he learns to mix the perfect solution: it still helps him _think_ but allows him enough clarity to appear sober. He’s not as high-strung, not as detached from reality, but almost as quick to take in _everything_.

But Lestrade? Lestrade catches on far too quickly, much more observant than he lets on, and he tells Sherlock to either get sorted out or to stay the hell away from his crime scenes.

Sherlock would prefer the former but it’s too much, and finally Lestrade tells him he has no other choice, apologises and locks him up for the night, leaves him waiting.

When Mycroft arrives to pick him up in his gleaming Mercedes accompanied by his newly appointed chauffeur, Sherlock is almost grateful. Less so, when he’s placed on house arrest in Mycroft’s pretentious home.

Sherlock spends four days hallucinating in a locked room, and on the fifth he lies on the floor, listening to the static settle into chaos, and trying to adjust to everything moving at half speed.

Mycroft stands in the doorway, looking smug and sour and relieved all at once. He keeps Sherlock locked up (theoretically: no door is locked and no one would think to stop him from leaving, but there is a part of him – a tiny part, the tiny annoying voice in the back of his head that sounds awful lot like Mummy – that tells him to stay put) for a month and a half before the two of them threaten to tear one another apart.

 

 

 

The flat on Montague Street, he’s told, has been paid for for six months in advance. Sherlock doesn’t need to search the flat to know it’s Mycroft’s way of justifying the hidden cameras and bugs he has no doubt had installed inside the walls and door frames.

Persuading Lestrade to let him back in on his cases takes longer than he anticipates, so he spends his waking hours playing rigorous notes on his violin and smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day.

Eventually Lestrade yields. He jokingly refers to what Sherlock does as ‘crime scene consulting’.

Sherlock begins to call himself a Consulting Detective.

 

 

 

His experiment on different types of tobacco ash is going well until number 142, after which his landlord evicts him. Sherlock is pleased to know Mycroft will be the one to pay for the damages.

 

 

 

He does not expect John Watson.

Doesn’t expect any aspect of him but, soon after their first meeting, comes to associate him with clarity, with tea that seems to materialise out of nowhere, with ugly jumpers, and with home.

Doesn’t expect him but would never give him up, _not for anything_.

Sometimes he wonders if he should work on expanding his personal vocabulary. Sometimes he tries to put into words what John Watson is, but can’t think of anything but the man’s name, everything somehow coming down to _John Hamish Watson_ and remaining  an unsolved, locked-room mystery.

It’s wildly unsettling.

(Until it isn’t.)

 

 

 

‘That’s what people do, don’t they? Leave a note?’

‘Leave a note when?’

‘Goodbye, John.’

 _Not for anything_.

Sherlock falls, and for a moment it does feel like flying.

 

 

 

Sherlock runs. He runs for months and months and months, never allowing himself to revert back to who he is; constantly taking on someone else’s life, someone else’s name, someone else’s vocabulary.

It’s dizzying, sometimes overwhelming, always all-consuming.

There’s no time to think about _why_ , only about _how_ , and finally, _finally_ , he can stop running and begin chasing, and even if it’s equally draining, it’s more proactive, and the trail of bodies and collapsing ruins of the criminal empire are a tangible reminder that he _is_ going somewhere, that he _isn’t_ just running without a purpose.

His mind is loud, shuts out everything irrelevant, and helps him concentrate single-mindedly on _this_ , only this.

Sometimes he feels like he’s watching himself run: floating somewhere outside his body, above the ground, immaterial. Desperately holding on to the shreds of his sanity, of himself, of the _why_ he’s actively not thinking about.

 

 

 

And then. Then there’s nothing but _this._

The final remaining connection in the legacy of the consulting criminal, the final stone in his shoe (he wants to think _problem_ , and does, and it makes the corner of his mouth twitch at the exquisite banality of it all). All that’s left of the supposedly indestructible web of organised crime is right _here_ , the conclusion, the finish line of the chase he set on months, years, _lifetimes_ ago.

Sherlock watches as the computer code wipes out what still remains of the carefully constructed database (a few simple lines of computer code; how fitting, how anticlimactic), feels the weight of the gun tucked against his back, under his jacket.

The screen blinks blue and then black, the machinery whirring desperately for a few more minutes before falling silent. The hum in his head echoes louder and louder and then comes to an abrupt stop.

He thinks of dead sparrows and notebooks in shoeboxes and shared cigarettes and when he blinks, there’s just the quiet, dark office in Eastern Los Angeles at three forty-six in the morning.

He remembers lying on the floor in Mycroft’s pretentious home and slowly drifting back to himself, everything moving at half-speed, underwater.

He walks out, hails a cab and hides in his tiny rental apartment for the next six days, tearing off the wallpaper and folding it into cranes and foxes and flowers, and hundreds and hundreds of imperfect aeroplanes.

On the seventh day he wakes up to the sound of footsteps and waits and waits, until an unaddressed envelope is slid under the door, and he listens, waits for the footsteps to retreat back into the hallway outside.

Inside the envelope is a flight ticket (ridiculous route with stop-overs on two different continents, supposedly for safety’s sake, but more likely because Mycroft knows how much he dislikes the lack of leg room in Economy) and a small white card with the words _Welcome back_ printed on it in twelve-point Times New Roman.

Sherlock breathes in, and thinks about tea that materialises out of nowhere, of ugly jumpers and of clarity, and breathes out.


End file.
